40+ Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Bitcoin

Since the advent of Bitcoin in January 2009, its presence has been felt all across the globe. For those unaware, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency or digital money that is designed to work as a medium of exchange using cryptography to control its creation and management, unlike regular currencies.

This mysterious internet borne asset has enormous amount of interest among people, because of the exponential rise in the price of bitcoin. By now, many people have heard of it, many people have started to use, many more people are doubtful about its legality and there are many others who don’t know enough about it. Bitcoin is getting acceptance from those who know about the decentralized system and willing to invest in it and transact in it. Here, we have compiled some interesting and fun facts about Bitcoin for you to make a better decision on whether it is wise or risky to invest in it?

The founder of Bitcoin is a mysterious figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto. No one knows the real identity or name hiding behind this pseudonym. Some even believe that Satoshi owns around 1 million bitcoins (which is equal to $2 billion).

The fact about the bitcoin that confuses the people the most is that this currency is not controlled by any single entity. We all have a general concept about currency and money that it is controlled by banks a single entity. Bitcoin defies all these concepts.

Since the bitcoin is a digital currency, many would think that there could be an infinite number of bitcoins because there’s no need to physically print the bills or mint the coins. But if it would be infinite then that would devalue the currency and render it worthless. Hence there are exactly 21,000,000 coins.

Bitcoins do not have a set value like the other currencies. If we look at any currency bill, the written value on it is the set value of it. That is not the case with bitcoin, the value of each individual bitcoin increases with every popularity.

The most unique thing about Bitcoins is that it is completely transparent. But it is not transparent with your personal data, just with transactions and amounts. Everything is visible on the blockchain and its complete openness is the reason that instills a lot of trust and security among the Bitcoin community.

You can mine bitcoins. Confused! Mining bitcoins actually means that a person is using a computer program to solve mathematical problems to verify various transactions around the world.

One of the most integral feature about bitcoins is that you cannot revoke a transaction which has been done nor anyone can force you to pay.

International transfer of bitcoins is either free or charges a very little amount, unlike the usual international bank transactions in which you need to pay bank transfer fees, currency conversion fees and more.

Bitcoins are held in secure digital wallets. Bitcoins are saved in bitcoin wallets which are highly secured storage wallet. Every bitcoin has a unique keys and address to them and if loose this wallet and keys all your bitcoins are lost, you will not be able to be spent it. Once, the wallet is lost the bitcoins are removed from the circulation.

Unlike the traditional currency, Bitcoins are based on Mathematics and are decentralized.

Bitcoins generated as a reward for mining halves every 4 years until all Bitcoins are fully mined.

Approximately 3,600 new bitcoins are mined each day.

In 2011, a company began marketing physical bitcoins in the United States. This mining company had to shut down when their secret was revealed to the US Treasury.

64% of the bitcoins are still untouched since the currency began. Hence, only 36% of the bitcoins are presently active.

5 years is the time taken for the value of a single bitcoin to go from $0 to $1.000 (Pound 613).

A survey done by LendEDU about Americans states that 78.50% of Americans have heard of Bitcoin. Out of that 78.50%, 11% think that it is illegal to own a Bitcoin in the U.S., while 48% are not sure about its legality. 14% of those Americans have owned it and 40% wants to own it in the Future. Whereas 34% are yet in confusion of buying it or not.

As per experts, the network of Bitcoin has a computing power of 2,046,364 Pflop/s. The strange fact is if we combine the computing power of the 500 most powerful supercomputers, the combined power would be 274 Pflop/s.

The amount of electricity required for running the Bitcoin network could power up to 1.3 million homes.

In the last decade, bitcoin has become the most popular buzzword in the digital world. The value of a bitcoin has risen to thousands of dollars in this decade. Though the value keeps on fluctuating hence, making the bitcoin highly volatile.

The fact that would surprise you more is that FBI has one of the world’s largest bitcoin wallets. FBI shut down one of the operation on the Silk Road and seized the owner’s assets. Hence, in that process FBI became one of the world’s wealthiest bitcoin owners.

James Howells one of the bitcoin owner absentmindedly threw away a hard drive containing the private key to 7,500 Bitcoin which is worth more than $15 million at present and is currently buried under mountains of trash in a Wales landfill.

May 22 is celebrated as the Bitcoin Pizza Day. On May 22, 2010, a first real purchase was done using Bitcoins. A Bitcoiner named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 number of bitcoins for buying two Papa John’s Pizza which was more than $7m in December 2013.

Genesis Mining sent a 3D Bitcoin Model into space, tied to a weather balloon in 2016. This journey was recorded with a GoPro and had no real reason behind it.

There are 1354 Bitcoin ATMs worldwide, in 55 countries by 21 ATM producers and 231 operators.

Belgium offers a Value Added Tax Exemption on Bitcoins.

Swiss has classified digital currency as a foreign currency.

Bitcoin has been made illegal in Kyrgyzstan, Bolivia, Ecuador, Vietnam, Iceland, Thailand and Bangladesh.

Brea mall in Brea has a Zenbox Bitcoin ATM.

The largest Bitcoin transaction was made back in 2013 of value $147 Mil which now has a value of $174 Mil, representing 1.6% of all Bitcoins in the circulation. The surprising part is that this transaction was tagged as “Shit Load of Money!”.

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